Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In a year already marked by grief, Americans mourn the loss of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Why did she mean so much to so many people, and what does her death mean for the future of the country?

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ruth Bader Ginsburg - the U.S. Supreme Court Justice and feminist icon affectionately dubbed “Notorious R.B.G.” - died Friday, September 18, of pancreatic cancer.  She was 87.  

It was my mother who told me, in a text that linked to an article confirming the news. Below she’d simply written, Oh, god.  

Now, there must be people who retain the power of speech in shocking moments, individuals for whom grief perhaps even translates to greater eloquence; it’s obvious, however, that my mom and I are not among them, because in the immediate aftermath of a loss that ached as keenly as a punch to the gut, neither of us could manage more than two words. The message I sent back was knee-jerk and visceral, an echo of the refrain that had begun to drum in my mind: Oh, no.  

No, no, please no.

Perhaps it seems strange how, despite her age and ill health, Justice Ginsburg’s death struck Americans completely by surprise. The only explanation I can offer is that RBG was a hero for so many of us, and especially for women and girls, so it felt impossible to imagine a future without her fighting the good fight in our nation’s highest court.

From its beginning, the story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life is the story of the American dream.  Born into an immigrant family in 1933, she was an incredibly talented student who earned top marks in university: first as an undergraduate at Cornell, and then in law school at Harvard and Columbia.

While her academic achievements did not protect her from blatant sexism - at Harvard, the dean famously asked why she and her eight female peers were occupying places that could have gone to men - Ginsburg refused to capitulate. Law firms would not hire women, but after graduating first in her class at Columbia in 1959 she secured a clerkship with a judge in New York, followed by a teaching position at Rutgers Law School.

It was at Rutgers that Ginsburg began the work that largely defines her legal career, using the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution to battle sex discrimination. In 1972 she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and by 1976 had won five of the six cases she’d argued before the Supreme Court.  

Ginsburg herself was nominated to the Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton; during the 27 years she served on the bench she continued to uphold women’s constitutional rights, in addition to voting in support of abortion, affirmative action, and voting rights. Despite her soft voice and shy disposition, Justice Ginsburg acquired a reputation as a feisty firebrand after she began reading dissents from the bench; she did this in order to show, as she put it, that under the majority “the Court not only got it wrong, but egregiously so.”

The “Notorious R.B.G.” identity was born after one such dissent in 2013, when an NYU law student posted Justice Ginsburg’s bench announcement on Tumblr. Thus followed the Halloween costumes and memes, as well as a documentary, an opera and a biopic starring Felicity Jones.  (For the record, of all the homages, my favorite is still "Ruth Baby Ginsburg".)  

Any account of RBG’s life is incomplete, however, should it fail to mention her relationships with two people: her mother and her husband. Justice Ginsburg often quoted her mother’s advice - namely, to channel useless emotion into productive action, to always be prepared to fend for herself, and to exhibit a lady’s self-control no matter the circumstances.  

As for her husband, Ruth Bader met Marty Ginsburg at Cornell when she was a freshman and he - a sophomore. They were married after she graduated and their first child was born in 1955, the year before she began attending Harvard Law School. (Seriously, just take a moment for that to sink in.)

Marty was also a student at Harvard - he was in the class immediately before his wife’s - but he became ill with cancer during his final year, so Ruth stayed up during the night to transcribe his senior paper. She completed her own studies in the early morning hours after he went back to sleep.

Such devotion was not one-sided, however, because Marty was always Ruth’s most fervent supporter. A prominent tax attorney himself, he brought her the first case that she would utilize to challenge discriminatory statutes. He also lobbied for his wife’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and when Ruth returned to the bench soon after cancer surgery in 2009, she said that Marty had told her she could do it. On the day after he died she went back to the Court to read an important opinion because, again, “Marty would have wanted it.”

Every piece of this woman’s life is a source of inspiration—her courage and grit, her love for her family, and her fierce determination to help America fulfill its promises for equality for all people. The rights that I often take for granted are only available to me now because trailblazers like Justice Ginsburg fought for them, and as I’ve started to write again in the days since her death, I decided that I couldn’t let this moment pass without paying tribute to her extraordinary memory.

I end here with this: I’ve felt a lot during the past nine months, as we all have. Everyone in the world has had to contend with fear and loss in 2020, but just when I thought we had reached the other side of the hump, my cellphone buzzed and I spent a Friday evening listing the dangers that lurk in the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s passing. Climate protection, immigration, healthcare, reproductive rights and gun control - all of these are now at stake as President Donald Trump seeks to fill that empty seat on the Supreme Court, despite the final wishes of its former occupant.

But fear, even when it approaches panic and slides towards fury, is not a useful emotion, nor can I say that obsessing over disaster is a pastime that Notorious R.B.G. would endorse. Instead, I’ll honor her memory the best way I can: by doing something productive, by voting and making my voice heard, to ensure that our country finally lives up to the very best of its own ideals.

That’s how Ruth, I believe, would have wanted it.

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